Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl a British author (1916-1990), born in Wales to Norwegian parents, one of the most popular children's writers of the twentieth century, celebrated for such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and The BFG, and also a writer of ingenious and often macabre short stories for adults.

Early Life and Wartime Service

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, near Cardiff, in September 1916, the son of Norwegian immigrants, and he was educated at English boarding schools and at Repton. The hardship and the corporeal punishments of his school years, which he later described with relish in his memoir Boy, left him with a lasting dislike of authority and a sympathy for children at the mercy of adults.

He joined the Shell oil company after school and was posted to East Africa, where he worked among the oilfields and learned something of the life of the colonies. When the Second World War broke out he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, trained as a fighter pilot, and was severely injured in a crash in the Libyan desert. He flew in the Mediterranean theatre and was invalided home.

In 1941 he was posted to Washington as an assistant air attaché, and there he met the writer C. S. Forester, who encouraged him to write about his flying experiences. His first published story, about a crash, appeared under the title Shot Down Over Libya, and it launched his career as an author. He had begun to write almost by accident.

Stories for Adults

Dahl's early reputation was made as a writer of short stories for adults, and his tales of the unexpected are among the most accomplished of their kind. Collected in such volumes as Someone Like You and Kiss Kiss, they combine a smooth and plausible surface with a sudden turn toward the macabre. He wrote of gamblers, con men, jealous spouses and vengeful servants with a cool and often cruel precision.

His stories were published in leading American magazines and were adapted for television, most memorably in the series Tales of the Unexpected, which made his twist endings famous. He also wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and he published a novel for adults, My Uncle Oswald, that displayed his taste for outrageous comedy.

The adult fiction shows the darker side of the imagination that in his children's books became a source of delight. The same delight in trickery and revenge, the same contempt for cruelty and greed, run through both bodies of work, and it was his skill in transferring these qualities to books for the young that made him a household name.

Books for Children

Dahl began writing for children in the 1960s, and James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) established him as a writer of extraordinary inventiveness and appeal. Charlie, with its gallery of spoiled children and the mysterious confectioner Willy Wonka, became one of the most celebrated children's books of the century and the basis of several films.

There followed Fantastic Mr Fox, Danny the Champion of the World, The Twits, The BFG, The Witches and Matilda, a run of books unmatched in modern children's literature for sheer inventiveness. Matilda, the story of a brilliant girl who outwits the monstrous headmistress Miss Trunchbull, became a particular favourite and has been adapted for the stage and the cinema. The BFG, which tells of a friendly giant, is among his most tender works.

His books are marked by a robust sense of justice, in which the wicked adults are punished and the resourceful children triumph. He wrote with an unashamed relish for mischief and made-up language, and he invented a vocabulary of nonsense words, some of which, like the giants' phrases in The BFG, have entered the language. He also wrote the autobiographical books Boy and Going Solo.

Style and Themes

Dahl's style is direct, energetic and profusely inventive. He addresses the child reader as an equal in mischief, and his narrators share his own gleeful contempt for bullies, gluttons and tyrants. His plots move at a rapid pace and are built on a clear moral opposition between the innocent and the cruel, and he never scruples to make the punishment of his villains as extreme as their offences.

His humour is often dark, and it has sometimes unsettled adults who expect children's books to be gentle. He considered that children have a robust appetite for the grotesque and the horrible, and that a story which does not acknowledge their sense of injustice condescends to them. His confidence in this view is one reason for his popularity with young readers.

He was also a practical and canny writer, attentive to the shape of a paragraph and to the sound of a sentence read aloud. He worked slowly and revised heavily, and he was prepared to disagree with publishers about the editing of his books. The apparent ease of his prose is the product of considerable craftsmanship.

Influence and Legacy

Dahl is one of the most widely read authors of the modern era. His books have sold in the hundreds of millions, are translated into many languages, and are recommended by teachers and librarians as a reliable way of turning children into readers. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre preserves his memory, and a charity supports the causes of literacy and of sick and disadvantaged children.

His work has been adapted for film, television, radio and the stage, and several of his stories have become enduring favourites of the cinema. His books continue to appear in new editions and to attract controversy about their language and their attitudes, a sign of the continuing interest that his imagination provokes.

He died in Oxford in November 1990. His reputation rests on a body of work that combines a genuine gift for storytelling with an unflinching sympathy for the weak, and on a voice, at once comic and menacing, that readers recognise at once as his own. He is remembered as one of the great entertainers of twentieth-century literature.

See also

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• Children's literature
• Tales of the Unexpected
• Matilda